Well, there is more. I wrote a bot that walks through every match in date order (see the code) and calculates a TrueSkill rating (TrueSkill was developed by Microsoft for Xbox Live, it’s like a modern version of ELO rating system). Each team starts with a μ score of 25.

So, who is the top ranked team in Planet Kubb? They have a μ score of 42.948. Hint: It’s not the Kubbchucks, we have a score of 28.205.

Also, if you haven’t checked out the event pages, club pages and team pages in a while. You should, they are much better. Like I said, more to come, this is a sneak peek.

Disclaimer: Both TrueSkill and ELO scores are based on a series of games played and the various skill levels of those matches. The TrueSkill value is recalculated weekly. As more matches from the past are added, these values will update and change to reflect the additional data. So, beware that these are dynamic and updating values.

Oh, and if you haven’t tried the Group X-Ray, give it a try. You’ll want to go here immediately when tournament groups are declared in the future. :-)

I was watching Survivor with the family last night. How fun would it be if Survivor had a reward challenge that was decided via a little Kubb tournament? They could do it when there are 12 players and have 4 teams of three play it out.

I added a new capability on Pitch this morning. Now, if when you post or comment here and you using an @thingles to notify someone they will get an email letting them know. So, @garrick will get an email making sure he knows I mentioned him. This works in comments as well. Kubb on!

However, I’ve never actually started a club so this is just what I would do. Several of you on Pitch have indeed started your own clubs and been very successful at it. It would be great if any of you could pitch in and add some more information to that page. Thanks!

I thought it might help to take some of my generic To Do items for the Planet Kubb Wiki and put them on the wiki so if others are looking for something they could do, there is a list! I put this on the Community portal page.

If you haven’t been to the new Planet Kubb site, you should. Check it out! Love to hear what everyone thinks. This also means that Planet Kubb now has an official blog so I’ll be putting big announcement stuff there instead of Pitch.

Please feel free to use Pitch like a forum. It’s a place to just collaborate with fellow Kubbers!

The open source software behind Ask Planet Kubb is Question2Answer and a new version came out today. I just upgraded Ask Planet Kubb to this new version (1.5.2 to 1.5.3). Most notably it has a much nicer theme that I’ve moved the site too. Much cleaner looking. I also updated the Polls plugin (1.5 to 2.1) and the Embed plugin (1.2 to 1.3). If you see anything wrong on the site leave a comment here.

I also enabled Recaptcha on Ask Planet Kubb. There were over fifty accounts created by spammers, most never used for that intent but I really don’t think that many people with Russian email addresses were registering. To keep things clean, I enabled Recaptcha. I also enabled Recaptcha for anonymous users. You can still ask a question on Ask Planet Kubb without registering.

Lastly, because we’ve had a couple of incidences of spam, I added yet another gate of moderation. For any account that has less than 150 points (you start with 100 and get points for activity) those posts, comments and answers will require moderation. This should alleviate any further questions about cheap health insurance. Ugh!